Writing Fiction, Tenth Edition: A Guide to Narrative Craft

writing

A Guide To nArrATive CrAfT

Tenth Edition

fiction

JAneT burrowAy

with elizAbeTh sTuCkey-frenCh and ned sTuCkey-frenCh

The universiTy of ChiCAGo Press Chicago and London

Contents

Preface xi 1 whATever works: The Writing Process 1 2 seeinG is believinG: Showing and Telling 22 3 buildinG ChArACTer: Characterization, Part I 44 4 The flesh MAde word: Characterization, Part II 75 5 lonG AGo And fAr AwAy: Fictional Setting 101 6 The Tower And The neT: Plot and Structure 124 7 CAll Me ishMAel: Point of View 153 8 is And is noT: Comparison 180 9 PlAy iT AGAin, sAM: Revision and Theme 201

Acknowledgments 225 Index 227

1:Whatever Works

The wriTinG ProCess

Get Started Keeping a Journal Freewriting and Freedrafting

Keep Going Prompts The Computer The Critic: A Caution Choosing a Subject Reading as a Writer

A Word about Theme

You want to write. Why is it so hard? There are a few lucky souls for whom the whole process of writing is easy, for whom the smell of fresh paper is better than air, whose minds chuckle over their own agility, who forget to eat, and who consider the world at large an intrusion on their good time at the keyboard. But you and I are not among them. We are in love with words except when we have to face them. We are caught in a guilty paradox in which we grumble over our lack of time, and when we have the time, we sharpen pencils, check email, or clip the hedges. Of course, there's also joy. We write for the satisfaction of having wrestled a sentence to the page, for the rush of discovering an image, for the excitement of seeing a character come alive. Even the most successful writers will sincerely say that these pleasures--not money, fame, or glamour--are the real rewards of writing. Fiction writer Alice Munro concedes:

It may not look like pleasure, because the difficulties can make me morose and distracted, but that's what it is--the pleasure of telling

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whATever works

the story I mean to tell as wholly as I can tell it, of finding out in fact what the story is, by working around the different ways of telling it.

Nevertheless, writers may forget what such pleasure feels like when confronting a blank page, like the heroine of Anita Brookner's novel Look at Me:

Sometimes it seems like a physical effort simply to sit down at my desk and pull out the notebook. . . . Sometimes the effort of putting pen to paper is so great that I literally feel a pain in my head.

It helps to know that most writers share the paradox of least wanting to do what we most want to do. It also helps to know some of the reasons for our reluctance. Fear of what could emerge on the page, and what it may reveal about our inner lives, can keep us from getting started. "What's called writer's block," claims novelist Tom Wolfe, "is almost always ordinary fear." Indeed, whenever I ask a group of writers what they find most difficult, a significant number answer that they feel they aren't good enough, that the empty page intimidates them, that they are in some way afraid. Many complain of their own laziness, but laziness, like money, doesn't really exist except to represent something else--in this case fear, severe self-judgment, or what Natalie Goldberg calls "the cycle of guilt, avoidance, and pressure."

There's another impediment to beginning, expressed by a writer character in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. Durrell's Pursewarden broods over the illusory significance of what he is about to write, unwilling to begin in case he spoils it. Many of us do this: The idea, whatever it is, seems so luminous, whole, and fragile, that to begin to write about that idea is to commit it to rubble. Knowing in advance that words will never exactly capture what we mean or intend, we must gingerly and gradually work ourselves into a state of accepting what words can do instead. No matter how many times we find out that what words can do is quite all right, we still shy again from the next beginning. Against this wasteful impulse I have a motto over my desk that reads: "Don't Dread; Do." It's a fine motto, and I contemplated it for several weeks before I began writing this chapter.

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The wriTinG ProCess

The mundane daily habits of writers are apparently fascinating. No author offers to answer questions at the end of a public reading without being asked: Do you write in the morning or at night? Do you write every day? Do you compose longhand or on a computer? Sometimes such questions show a reverent interest in the workings of genius. More often, I think, they're a plea for practical help: Is there something I can do to make this job less horrific? Is there a trick that will unlock my words?

GeT sTArTed The variety of authors' habits suggests that there is no magic to be found in any particular one. Donald Hall spent a dozen hours a day at his desk, moving back and forth between as many projects. Philip Larkin said that he wrote a poem only every eighteen months or so and never tried to write one that was not a gift. Gail Godwin goes to her workroom every day "because what if the angel came and I wasn't there?" Julia Alvarez begins the day by reading first poetry, then prose, by her favorite writers "to remind me of the quality of writing I am aiming for." Like Hemingway, Andre Dubus advised students to stop writing midsentence in order to begin the next day by completing the thought, thereby reentering the creative flow. Yelizaveta P. Renfro always begins with lists, "often in the margins or endpapers of books I'm reading." T. C. Boyle starts knowing "nothing. Nothing at all. The first line comes and I start." Shawn Wong wants "to hear the language in my ears before I start writing." Dickens could not deal with people when he was working: "The mere consciousness of an engagement will worry a whole day." Thomas Wolfe wrote standing up. Some writers can plop at the kitchen table without clearing the breakfast dishes; others need total seclusion, a beach, a cat, a string quartet.

There is something to be learned from all this, though. It is not an "open sesame" but a piece of advice older than fairy tales: Know thyself. The bottom line is that if you do not at some point write your story down, it will not get written. Having decided that you will write it, the question is not "How do you get it done?" but "How do you get it done?" Any discipline or indulgence that helps nudge you into position facing the

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whATever works

page is acceptable and productive. If jogging after breakfast energizes your mind, then jog before you sit. If you have to pull an all-nighter on a coffee binge, do that. Some schedule, regularity, pattern in your writing day (or night) will always help, but only you can figure out what that pattern is for you.

But you don't have time! It's true, Another really important part you don't. You have a job, six courses, of my writing process is that I two kids, a dying parent, a divorce. have a writing group. . . . You I know; I've gone through all those sit down, you're in a room, things. One truth is that these hour- everyone has the experience eaters will never get any easier; ob- together. ligations and pleasures accumulate, --Jennifer Egan and if you're lucky, life is always too full. If you're not, it's worse. So it's not that there will be no better time to develop the writing habit; there will no other time.

Yet I believe it is not really, or not mainly, a question of time. I used to fret that I never had time to write--yet I notice that I have time to read the morning op-eds, do some stretching exercises, put fresh flowers on the table, read one more chapter of fiction, have a glass of wine in front of the evening news, catch whatever late-night comic grabs my attention before I go to bed. What all those things have in common is that I don't make myself do them; I allow myself. The lesson is not that I should give up any of those pleasures in order to write. It's that I should allow myself also to write every day. It is not a duty; it's what I want to do and am willing to structure my life to do. Try--over and over again, if necessary--to think of that writing time, wherever it falls in your day, however short or long it is, as the time you allow yourself to indulge in this activity that is not an obligation but a choice.

Keeping a Journal There are, though, a number of tricks you can teach yourself in order to free the writing self, and the essence of these is to give yourself permission to fail. The best place for such permission is a private place, and for that reason a writer's journal is an essential, likely to be the source of originality, ideas, experimentation, and growth.

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The wriTinG ProCess

Keep a journal. A journal is an intimate, a friend that will accept you as you are. Pick a notebook you like the look of, one you feel comfortable with. I find a bound blank book too elegant to live up to, preferring instead a loose-leaf because I write my journal mainly at the computer and can stick anything in at the flip of a three-hole punch. But you can glue scribbled napkins into a spiral, too, or take a picture and upload it, if you prefer to keep your journal entirely on the computer.

Keep the journal regularly, at least at first. It doesn't matter what you write and it doesn't matter very much how much, but it does matter that you make a steady habit of the writing. Keeping a journal regularly will put you in the habit of observing in words. If you know at dawn that you are committed to writing so many words before dusk, you will halfconsciously tell the story of your day to yourself as you live it, finding phrases to catch whatever catches your eye. When that habit is established, you'll begin to find that whatever invites your sympathy or anger or curiosity may be the beginning of invention.

But before the habit is developed, you may find that even a blank journal page has the awesome aspect of a void, and you may need some tricks of permission to let yourself start writing there. The playwright Maria Irene Fornes says that there are two of you: one who wants to write and one who doesn't. The one who wants to write had better keep tricking the one who doesn't. Another way to think of this conflict is between your right brain and left brain--the playful, detail-loving creator, and the linear critic. The critic is an absolutely essential part of the writing process. The trick is to shut him or her up until there is something to criticize.

Freewriting and Freedrafting Freewriting is a technique that allows you to take very literally the notion of getting something down on paper. It can be done whenever you want to write, or just to free up the writing self. The idea is to put . . .

anything on paper and I mena anything, it doesn't matter as long as it's coming out of your head nad hte ends of your fingers, down ont the page I wonder if;m improving, if this process gets me going better now than it did all those--hoewever many years

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